OK, so you’ve been reading my articles for a little while. You’ve been thinking you really ought to improve your eating habits, get more exercise and sleep, and generally look after yourself better. But you just can’t seem to get started with those healthy changes… or you do make some changes, but then you lapse back into your old ways.
If this describes you, you’re not alone! I encounter this problem virtually every day when working with my clients, and I have a unique solution to it.
Most people, when they find themselves in this situation, assume that the problem is that they don’t have enough willpower. So they try to will themselves to change. Every morning, they wake up and promise themselves they won’t eat any junk food, won’t smoke cigarettes, will go to the gym, won’t overspend on their credit card, etc etc etc!
They might last a couple of days… or maybe only a couple of hours. Then they ‘bust’ and give in to the urge to eat or do whatever they’ve been denying themselves. And then they beat themselves up for being so lazy or weak, promise themselves they’ll do better tomorrow… and the whole cycle starts again.
If you’re nodding your head furiously by now, saying “This is me! Now, what can I do about it?”, the first thing you need to realise is that willpower doesn’t work when it comes to changing habits.
After all, the people I see who assume that a lack of willpower is their problem, do manage to exercise willpower in many other areas of their lives: they perform their work duties each day whether they feel like it or not; they get up and get their kids to school each day even if they’d much rather stay in bed; they pay the electricity bill even if they don’t really feel like it.
The difference between these situations and the ones they’re struggling with, is that they have emotional blocks to changing their habits, and this short-circuit in their ’emotional brain’ prevents them from starting, or continuing with, the changes that their ‘rational brain’ says they want to make.
‘Sally’ is an excellent example. She had seen me some years ago, adopted a high-nutrient plant-based diet, lost weight, gained energy and generally felt great. But over time, she had lapsed back into her old ways. She wasn’t happy with the weight she’d regained, had concerns about her future health, and really wanted to return to her healthy diet – but she just couldn’t get herself ‘off the starting blocks’.
I asked her what she thought might be in her way when it came to changing her habits, and the first thought she had was that her husband and teenage children would resist the change. This had, in fact, happened last time she’d gone on a healthy diet, and changed her cooking habits accordingly.
We started doing EFT on her feelings about this resistance, and she very quickly became aware that the fundamental problem was that she feared their rejection of her cooking. This in turn hinged on her lack of confidence in her cooking ability.
I asked her to think of a specific incident that really summed up this lack of confidence, and she came up with it instantly: early on in her marriage, the in-laws had come over for dinner, she tried out a dish she’d never made before, and had served the meal to the in-laws, undercooked.
She could still vividly recall her young niece saying ‘It’s still raw!’, and the memory was deeply disturbing. We did some very intensive EFT on ‘The Raw Chicken Incident’, focusing on her memory of those words and the kicked-in-the-guts feeling they still evoked after so many years. By the time we finished she could replay the incident in her mind without feeling distressed by it.
At her next consultation, Sally happily informed me that she had gone home after that session and felt inspired to clean up her kitchen and get organised for the change in her cooking. She had been preparing much healthier meals since then, and while she hadn’t yet ‘stretched her wings’ in a culinary sense, she was happy with how easy it had been for her to commit to following a healthy path.
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